Direct is now the minority channel for independent hotels. That is a pricing problem before it is a marketing one

Where independents actually stand

Cloudbeds, reading 90 million bookings, put marketplace share of independent-hotel bookings at 63.4 percent for 2025, with direct as the residual and still falling as a share of online revenue. HOTREC's European work shows the other half of the picture: across all channels, including telephone, walk-in and repeat, roughly half of European overnights are still direct. The direct habit exists. What has been lost is the online part of it, to properties that present better and to channels that present relentlessly.

Why the gap persists

The rate is not actually comparable

A guest comparing your site against a marketplace is comparing two numbers that mean different things: one with taxes shown, one without; one with breakfast, one without; one with free cancellation, one not. If your own site does not make the whole cost and the whole inclusion obvious in the first screen, the comparison resolves against you regardless of the underlying price.

The path is longer

Marketplaces have spent a decade removing steps. An independent booking engine on a different domain, asking for an account, hiding the room list behind a calendar, and taking eleven seconds to load on a phone, is competing against two seconds and three taps.

The measurement is broken, so the media is mispriced

Because bookings jump to the engine's domain, a large share of direct bookings are recorded as direct traffic or as a self-referral. The property then under-invests in the channels that actually work, because they appear not to. We cover the mechanics of this in a separate piece.

The order that works

Direct share moves in a specific sequence, and doing it out of order wastes money.

1. Parity first. If your own rate is undercut on the dates you are advertising, everything downstream leaks.
2. Then the path. Room pages that answer the question, whole-cost rates, a booking flow that works with one thumb.
3. Then measurement. Tracking that survives the engine hop, so the next decision is made on evidence.
4. Then demand. Search, AI visibility, metasearch and paid media, bought against a cost per direct booking you can now actually see.
5. Then retention. The guest list you have been collecting and not using, which is the cheapest direct demand available to you.

What direct share is worth

At a 20 percent all-in marketplace cost against a direct cost at the middle of the 3.5 to 7 percent range, every point of revenue moved is worth roughly 14 percent of that revenue, straight to the operating line. For a property with a million in room revenue, ten points of shift is around £14,000 a year, before counting the lower cancellation rate and the value of owning the guest relationship. That is the size of the prize, and it is why the work is worth sequencing properly rather than buying campaigns.